In the following discussion, the invention is disclosed with respect to a particular financial instrument, FX spot, traded on an anonymous trading system. It is to be understood that the invention is applicable to any trading system in which credit is assigned by at least one party to possible deals with one or more counterparties, and to the trading of any fungible. The fungible may be an instrument such as a financial instrument but could also be any other type of fungible such as a commodity for example metals, energy, foodstuffs etc. The invention is also applicable to any financial instrument including, but not limited to, FX products such as, but not limited to, Spot, forwards, outrights, FRA's and futures and other non-FX products such as equity products.
The term fungible used herein means any product that is capable of being traded.
Anonymous trading systems are well known and have been used to trade financial instruments such as Foreign Exchange (FX) Spot for a number of years. Examples of anonymous trading systems are disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,375,055 and EP-A-0399850. In each of these systems, part of a trading book is distributed to a trader's workstation. Traders submit quotes to the system anonymously which quotes are matched by a matching engine to execute deals after credit limits have been checked. In an anonymous trading system, traders are presented with quotes that have been entered into the market by counter-parties. The trader can attempt to deal with these quotes but does not know the identity of the counter-party with whom he is dealing. This identity is only given up when the deal has been completed. As the identity of the counter-party is unknown, the trader's financial institution assigns credit limits to trades with all possible counter-parties trading on the system. Credit limits limit the institution's exposure should the counter-party default on a deal and are an indication of the risk represented by trading with each counter-party. U.S. Pat. No. 5,375,055 discloses the concept of screening quotes input into the system and only displaying to a given user those quotes with which they have credit to trade. This avoids the possibility of a trader trying to trade a quote only to find that the deal is refused through lack of credit. In a fast moving volatile market this can cause a trader to lose a trading opportunity.
Interbank anonymous trading systems have been very successful. However they are largely limited to major banks. Smaller banks have limited access to the systems as they are not allocated sufficient credit by the major banks to ‘see’ the best prices. One reason for this is the risk perceived by the larger banks of trading large amounts with smaller, less credit worthy, banks. Because a smaller bank does not have any or much credit with many of the counter-parties on the system, and because undealable quotes are hidden, a smaller bank has only a limited subset of quotes with which it can trade. The quotes are often not the best prices in the system. As a result, the smaller banks are at a disadvantage and tend not to use the systems, preferring to trade through other channels such as direct dealing systems or conventional voice brokers. This is undesirable from the point of view of the smaller banks as they are not getting the best deals available. It is also undesirable from the point of view of the trading system operator as the potential liquidity of the system is reduced. Liquidity is a measure of the number of quotes in the system and must reach a certain level before the system becomes a viable trading forum. The loss of smaller banks in the more common currency pair markets such as USD:JPY (United States Dollar to Japanese Yen) is not critical to the operation of these markets but it is more important in less liquid markets, for example USD:AUD (United States Dollar to Australian Dollar).